The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Pelican Books)

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Bogdanovka, which today lies in Ukraine close to the River Bug, was then part of Transnistria, the area of Soviet Ukraine between the Dniester and Bug rivers that was occupied by Romania, which invaded the USSR alongside the German Wehrmacht in June that year. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? The implications of all this could hardly be more sobering. Just as “Nazism was the most extreme manifestation of sentiments that were quite common, and for which Hitler acted as a kind of rainmaker or shaman”, suggests Stone, the defeat of his regime has left us with “a dark legacy, a deep psychology of fascist fascination and genocidal fantasy that people turn to instinctively in moments of crisis – we see it most clearly in the alt-right and the online world, spreading into the mainstream, of conspiracy theory”. His book offers a brisk, compelling and scholarly account of the Nazi genocide and its aftermath. But never for one moment does it let us believe that the events are now safely in the past. Without the support of countries such as France, Slovakia, Greece, Hungary and Romania, the Holocaust would not have happened in the way it did. The Germans, we read, relied heavily on local assistance in deporting the 56,000 Jews of Salonika. Stone exposes myths: while Bulgaria might like to remember how it refused to hand over its Jews to the Nazis, the truth is it was Bulgarian policemen and other administrators who oversaw the rounding up and deportation of Macedonian Jews to Treblinka death camp. Croatia, we learn, ran its own extermination camp at Jasenovac. Romania deported many Jews on its own initiative to Transnistria in the autumn of 1941, dumping them there in makeshift camps and leaving them to fend for themselves – in pigsties, for instance – and to die in their tens of thousands. But the rapid switches between locations, events and individuals can sometimes make for choppy reading. Meanwhile, the publisher’s grandiose claim that this book “upends much of what we think we know about the Holocaust” is inadvisable and overblown.

This vital history shatters many myths about the Nazi's genocide . . . Drawing on the latest scholarship in English and German, Stone's brisk, energetic book fizzes with ideas . Indeed, even if you think you know the subject, you'll probably find something here to make you think . . . surprising . . . provocative . . . an excellent book ― Sunday Times In one of the many carefully chosen and deeply haunting stories relayed in The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, Dan Stone records how a father, when the noise made by his nine-year-old boy threatens to have their family expelled by the man hiding them, strangles his son. “I am forever accursed as the murderer of my son,” he explains, “but I spared him much more suffering. At least I didn’t let him die at the hands of the murderers.” Brian Eno has just won the Golden Lion for music at the Venice Biennale, which obliged him to perform with an orchestra. Anyone expecting classical conformity from this boffin of sound, however, hasn’t been paying attention for the past... ★★★★☆These details are hard to read, and one can see why the Holocaust often provokes what Stone calls “a generalised looking away”. His own passion for his subject and its importance is compelling, as is his willingness to confront both moral and historical questions. The Holocaust is much-discussed, much-memorialised and portrayed in fiction. But major parts of the Holocaust have still not been understood. In this lecture, drawing on his new book The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, Dan Stone will emphasise: the need to understand the significance of Nazism's genocidal ideology; that the commonly heard concept of "industrial genocide" gives only an incomplete representation of what happened; the fact that the genocide of the Jews required continent-wide collaboration; and the depth of the trauma engendered by the Holocaust. A woman with children at Auschwitz II in May or June 1944. Part of the Auschwitz Album. Wiki Commons. German Federal Archives. P eople glancing at this book might ask whether we need another general history of the Holocaust. There are already well-established syntheses and original overviews, including Saul Friedländer’s path-breaking two-volume history of the persecution and extermination of Europe’s Jews, in which he called for an ‘integrated history’ giving voice to victims. What does Dan Stone’s latest have to add to the existing literature?

This book was not what I expected it to be i.e a chronological narrative of the Holocaust. While it discusses the history of the Holocaust, it is in often less detailed than the excellent book of Laurence Rees (The Holocaust : a New History) but highlights a number of points not covered as well in other books :The book’s main strength is its comparison of different countries, their authorities and their willingness to collaborate with the Nazis or slaughter local Jews themselves. The chapter on the death marches, when inmates were moved between concentration camps, and the eventual liberation of those camps and its aftermath, is especially strong, perhaps because Professor Stone has already written a book on this specific area.